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in reply to Re^5: perllocale weirdness, bug, or...?
in thread perllocale weirdness, bug, or...?

Thank you; indeed, Perl has no guilt.

As I was trying to track down a slightly more complicated issue, I just was on the wrong track for a while.

Looks like _my_ real problem originates from something I now believe to be an en_US.UTF-8 locale/glibc bug or problem which I can reproduce at system level.

Given a simple file having two records with two TAB separated fields each, like 
a_2    2
a2     1
a command like 'sort -k 1 | cut -f 1 ' on that file displays 
a2
a_2
(as if the field delimiter wouldn't work and the second field determines the ordering), whereas on the same file _without_ the second field the sort order is reversed.

This looks like a bug to me, tough I'm not sure yet and don't really know so far whom I should or could report this.

Thanks!
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  • Comment on Re^6: perllocale weirdness, bug, or...?

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Re^7: perllocale weirdness, bug, or...?
by ikegami (Patriarch) on Oct 21, 2010 at 16:01 UTC

    Maybe trailing numbers are special. Add one character to every item you want to sort, sort the items, then chop them.

    Update: I guess that only works if the character is the one with the lowest sort order, and which one that is isn't known.

[reply]
Re^7: perllocale weirdness, bug, or...?
by choroba (Cardinal) on Oct 22, 2010 at 11:21 UTC
    You should use sort -k1,1 to make sort ignore the rest of the line.
[reply]
[d/l]
      Thanks for the tip - I really hoped it might solve the issue, but unfortunately it does not.

      For the file test.txt (TAB separated fields) being 
      a_2     2
a2      1

      [download]
      I still get 
      $ sort -k 1,1 test.txt | cut -f 1
a2
a_2

      [download]
      whereas when there is no second field then the result is reversed, 
      a_2
a2

      [download]
      Looks like the problem 'survives'.
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[reply]
[d/l]
[select]
        Looks like two level sort: on the first level, it ignores the _, but if the strings are different only thanks to the underscore, it is used in the second level. 
        $ echo $'a_2\t2\na2\t1' | sort -k1
a2      1
a_2     2
$ echo $'a_2\t2\na2\t1' | sort -k1,1
a2      1
a_2     2
$ echo $'a2\t2\na_2\t1' | sort -k1,1
a2      2
a_2     1
$ echo $'a2\t2\na_2\t1' | sort -k1
a_2     1
a2      2

        [download]
[reply]
[d/l]

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